Link: http://www.csoonline.com/article/701040/how-to-sneak-into-a-security-conference?page=1

Geek-dad employs some money-ball-esque stats analysis to choose an elementary school;
Link: http://m.wired.com/geekdad/2012/02/school-by-the-numbers/

Included in a New York Times article on the posting of audio from an FBI conference call, is a more disturbing report - 

the group took responsibility for hacking the Web site of a law firm that had represented Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who was accused of leading a group of Marines responsible for killing 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005. The group said it would soon make public “mails, faxes, transcriptions” and other material related to the case, taken from the site of Puckett & Faraj, a Washington-area law firm. A voluminous 2.55 gigabyte file labeled as those files was later posted on a site often used by hackers, Pirate Bay.

“Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s.

“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that would have littered Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said, before asking a question he hopes he can answer: “Who were the early adopters, the first mainstream authors to trade in their typewriters for WordStar and WordPerfect?”

From Jennifer Schuessler, The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute, New York Times (December 25, 2011)

Dahlia Lithwick on Justice Kagan’s first term

Software to detect and rate amount of photoshopping in photos on the horizon

“The relief granted by the court is extraordinary in its scope, and includes:

- an injunction against the defendants prohibiting them from using any Chanel marks or selling any Chanel products;

- an injunction against the top-level domain name registry, directing it to change the registrar of record for the domain names to GoDaddy (!);

- an injunction telling GoDaddy to change the DNS data for the domain names so the domain names resolve to a site where a copy of the case documents are hosted (servingnotice.com/sdv/index.html);

- authorization for Chanel to enter the domain names into “Google’s Webmaster Tools” and cancel any redirection of the domain names;

- an order requiring Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to “de-index and/or remove [the domain names] from any search results pages.”
Chanel is required to post a bond in the amount of $20,000.”

“He was Jefferson’s heir, his time’s foremost champion of personal liberty, raging against the concentration of wealth and power that had accompanied the nation’s industrialization. But Darrow also thought of the law as blood sport. He shamelessly seduced juries with his common man routine — the rumpled suits and suspenders, the gentle country drawl — and his extraordinary closing statements, which he packed with philosophy, poetry and cheap emotions meant to make men cry. Those were the benign manipulations, Farrell argues. In some of his biggest cases Darrow bought the testimony he needed. And when he was apparently caught in the act in 1911, he hired as his counsel the most ruthless criminal lawyer he could find — a flashy-dressing, hard-drinking, anti-union conservative — because there was no point in confusing means and ends.

A similarly callous streak ran through Darrow’s personal life. He divorced his first wife because she wasn’t sophisticated enough; married his second because she doted on him; then took a mistress 21 years his junior. He cheated on his law partners too, handing them work he didn’t want to do and pocketing fees they were supposed to share. And for all his radicalism, Darrow loved a big payday: according to Farrell, he took on Leopold and Loeb, two sons of privilege, primarily because their parents offered him a $65,000 retainer.

Once the deal was struck, though, he gave them a brilliant defense, the horror of their crime buried beneath layers of psychological theory and wrenching appeals for mercy. When he was done, the tears came streaming down his face, because he meant every word he said. That was vintage Darrow, his onetime partner Edgar Lee Masters wrote, “with his young, old heart and … his infinite paradox,” inspiring, enraging, and in Farrell’s engrossing biography, marvelously alive.”